The present invention, relates to such apparatuses for use in offices etc. as various communication facilities including facsimile devices, telephone sets, terminals for conferences, terminals for local area networks (LAN), and terminals of integrated service digital networks (ISDN); various input/output devices including printers and image scanners; copying machines, word processors, and personal computers.
Conventionally, operation states of communication apparatuses such as a facsimile device and a telephone set are notified to the user by use of voices and lamps as described in the JP-A-3-19567.
With the advance of the personal apparatuses for communications together with the development of dial-in systems, there have been installed a plurality of communication apparatuses in offices. This tendency is expected to be further enhanced. However, according to the prior art above, in an operation of the apparatus to connect a call or in an abnormal state thereof, the operation state is notified only by an audible tone or a lamp on a console panel thereof. This consequently leads to a problem that it is difficult for the user to recognize from a position apart from the apparatus (for example, by about several meters) which one of the apparatuses is receiving a call or which one thereof is in the fault.
In addition, each of the apparatuses such as coping machines and facsimile devices has, for example, a form feeder unit as an internal constituent component in a housing thereof. An abnormality, for example, a paper jam, may easily take place in the form feeder. To cope with the difficulty, the copying machine or the like is-provided with a cover, which can be opened and closed when necessary, at a position of the housing associated with the form feeding equipment. However, in the conventional copying machine, when the cover is closed, the inside of the form feeder cannot be visually checked by the operator. Consequently, each time an abnormality such as a paper jam occurs, the operator is inconveniently required to open the cover to check whether or not a sheet of paper is jammed therein.
In this connection, some application examples using a polymer dispersed liquid crystal display in fields other than the communication fields have been described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,749,261 corresponding to JP-A-62-229116, U.S. Pat. No. 4,613,207 corresponding to JP-A-61-502286, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,893,903 and 4,382,995 corresponding to JP-A-62-161189. In these applications, the technology is applied to a windowpane, a sunroof of an automobile, a liquid crystal display of a projection type, and a road sign.